We all know they are caught up in the warming meme, but the Met Office in the UK is now trying to spin the idea that they had truly forecasted a cold and snowy winter, but they just didn’t tell anyone. The rationale? We skeptics here (and elsewhere) are a bunch of meanies for making fun of the BBQ summer that never happened, so we’ll keep it to ourselves.
The spin you are about to witness is Maytag quality spin. It is shameless, stupid, and beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Both James Delingpole and Autonomous Mind take the Met Office out for a spin cycle that ends up in a full stop. The propaganda is shameless, the smell odious, and the public relations disaster is even worse than before. They apparently just don’t know when to stop talking.
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From Autonomous Mind:
This is a potentially huge story with a nasty smell of conspiracy about it. There appears to be a concerted effort to whitewash serious failings at the Met Office, with the assistance of a senior climate change propagandist at the BBC who is fully bought in to the Met Office’s warmist agenda.
The Telegraph reports today that: ‘The Met Office knew that Britain was facing an early and exceptionally cold winter but failed to warn the public, hampering preparations for some of the coldest weather on record.’ The article goes on to say:
In October the forecaster privately warned the Government – with whom it has a contract – that Britain was likely to face an extremely cold winter.
It kept the prediction secret, however, after facing severe criticism over the accuracy of its long-term forecasts.
October? That is the same month that this temperature probability map was published – for public consumption:
There is absolutely no logical or rational basis for the Met Office publishing the probability map above, yet ‘secretly’ telling the government a completely different story. The Met Office not only published the map, it had meterologists speaking publicly about the map and setting an expectation of a very high probability of warmer than average winter, as I will explain…
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The stench of deceit surrounding the Met Office, it’s disgraceful self serving effort to mislead the public and apparent attempt by a publicly funded BBC journalist to distort the facts is overpowering. There now needs to be an independent inquiry into this whole matter. A Freedom of Information request is being submitted to ask for this secret October forecast.
Read the whole post here at: Autonomous Mind
From James Delingpole at the Telegraph:
So apparently the Met Office isn’t useless after all. Just cruelly misunderstood.
It seems that the reason it didn’t provide an accurate forecast of this winter was not because it didn’t know bad weather was coming. It was because we were all so horrid last time it made a boo boo over the infamous “barbecue summer” that it decided it wouldn’t make its forecasts public any more.
Which means the real victim of this sorry story is not us (for having been misled about the extremity of cold we could expect this winter) but the poor old, much-put-upon, much-maligned, but basically splendid and well worth the £170 million it costs us every year Met Office.
Hurrah, Hurrah and Thrice Hurrah for those magnificent men (and women: let’s not forget the great Julia Slingo) at the Met Office!
Hmm. Is anyone else as unpersuaded as I am by this extravagantly implausible piece of spin? There’s a big clue in the identity of the fellow from whom it originated: Roger Harrabin. Yes, Roger Harrabin as in the BBC’s High Priest of Gaian Worship and Climate Alarmism.
Read the whole post by James Delingpole at the Telegraph.
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Surely the good people of the UK have to be sick of this by now?
If you are, here’s my advice: picket the Met Office.
Borrow the tactics shown by the greens at Ratcliffe and Kingsnorth and show the burea-weasels what it’s like to feel the brunt of public scorn. A few protestors with a banner outside the Met Office (shown below) would be all it takes to make the news.
Demand accountability, not GIGO spin.
Carry on Climesters
“No! It was *their* fault! We told them this would happen!” – AKA, protecting our funding (and we’d like one of those sexy new computers, thank you).
H.M. Government’s response (eventually), “No they didn’t! At least not in time for us to act in the best interests of the public” – AKA, we gambled and lost. But that’s not going to stop us riding the gravy train of AGW, umm, we mean funding worthless ‘alternative renewable energy’, umm, tapping the incredible potential of this revenue stream…
It’s pathetic, really. It smacks of playground behaviour.
Sooooo… let me get this straight… they were so wary from the poor treatment that they received when wrongly predicting the “BBQ Summer” that in response they made a wrong prediction of a warmer than average winter when they knew it would be wrong?
In other news they want us to think that they are smart by convincing us that they are stupid.
All of climate science is like this.
Rewriting of history is how it is done.
Robert of Ottawa said at 6:26 pm:
I said at 3:53 pm:
Great minds think alike. Often there’s a time delay. Makes for interesting patent fights.
Although it’s more palatable to think the Met Office was merely ripping off P.T. Barnum. Nowadays they really have to work hard at fooling only some of the people for just some of the time.
So, what if I tell you that one year from now the stock market index will be higher? If it is, I was right and if it isn’t, no problem, I just didn’t want you to panic… Using the same line of logic as the MET Office, my Market Predictions are always correct!!!
“Green Sand says:
January 4, 2011 at 4:30 pm
There are also one or two of us who would like to know what is going on with HadCRUT3?
No sign of a November number yet, now 5th Jan?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
Cold got into the super chips? I wonder if we might see a “joint” announcement about 2010 from both side of the pond?”
A very interesting question!!
By the way, the November Hadcrut3 number was 0.431, but as you say, it was not on the site you refer to.
See: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/12/hadcrut3-2010-will-be-2nd-5th-warmest.html
A quote from the above:
“It just happens that since the ClimateGate, Jones’ team is indicating a much lower warming trend than Hansen’s team: Phil Jones’ HadCRUT3 dataset is attributing November 2010 the coolest rating among Novembers and among the four datasets – with a 0.43 °C global anomaly, it was the 7th warmest November – while the GISS dataset says that November 2010 was the warmest November on record.”
So could this huge and possibly embarrassing difference between #1 and #7 for November make the two of them decide to “homogenize” things better in the future?
I wonder just how happy “the Cabinet” is to have the buck/hot potato passed to them. Because if the MET did tell them, and they encouraged the disastrously blissful ignorance that resulted in the Winter Disaster, they all need to go up against the wall.
To be convinced of catastrophic global warming while freezing to death has to be te epitome if doublethink. Orwell FTW
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
I agree:
But what if they are being truthfully accused? What if they, like the bigshots in the Met Office, didn’t want to dilute the “Getting Warmer” message?
I can easily imagine them sitting on the warning and trying to “stay on message” and hoping they’d slide by with at worst only a slightly colder winter, not one that would be noticed as being way off from the forecast, and so there’d be no reckoning.
And I can imagine them thinking that the Met Office would never squeal on them even if it did turn really cold. I guess it didn’t occur to them that the criticism of the Met Office might become so intense that its targets would finally crack and spill the beans.
Of course, this raises the question, If they (our betters) were willing to spin and obfuscate this much here, in order to suppress an inconvenient truth, would they have been willing to do so there?
And there? And there?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Mom’s old Maytag washer finally gave up the ghost after 50+ years, but the dryer is still doing the job.
Our local Maytag repairman (yes, Virginia) informs that the “Maytag-quality spin” isn’t what it used to was, ever since Whirlpool took over the Newton, Iowa based company.
The MET Office and CRU should be disbanded.
The British are in big trouble here.
Credibility???
My best suggestion is for the people of the U.K. to find a good law firm and file a class action lawsuit against the gov. and MET for dereliction of duty in the death and hardship caused by their gross misconduct of the people of the UK. Biusness owners as well come together and do the same for finanicial losses. That is if the UK allows class action suits, if not then do it on an individual basis!
Methinks the Met Office is having its own 10:10 moment.
And that noise off in the distance is 10,000 UK lawyers all arriving at work early to start drafting class action law suits.
No pressure.
This poster needs to hang in the office of anyone making predictions:
CONSISTENCY: It is only a virtue if you are not a screw-up
http://www.despair.com/consistency.html
You couldn’t make this [snip] up, …… oh, wait, ……………
they did, …..
Roger Knights:
It could be that the politicians were in fact warned, but that also would put them in the hotseat for failing to prepare, which as a government is a fundamental part of their job (keeping up with sidewalks, roads, sewer, gas, and electric). If true then the Met office, for no good reason at all, has revealed something that puts a bunch of powerful politicians in very hot water. The natural response from the politicians would be to virtually defund the Met office and fire all the back-stabbing forecasters.
However, if the politicians weren’t warned, then the Met office is trying to burn powerful politicians to protect what little remains of their own disastrously poor reputation. In that case the natural response is to defund the Met office and fire all the lying traitorous forecasters.
There really isn’t a third option.
I would liken the Met’s new claim to a national bank staff that, completely out of the blue, announces that they’ve been embezzling billions from the public purse but that the politicians knew about it all along. The staff is definitely going to get fired, to the man, and the best they could hope for is to get immunity for their testimony if their claims about the politicians is true.
Brian H said
“wonder just how happy “the Cabinet” is to have the buck/hot potato passed to them. Because if the MET did tell them, and they encouraged the disastrously blissful ignorance ……….”
I really shouldn’t try catching up on WUWT posts when I’m tired. I just read this one and thought it said that the MET had publicly forecast a warm winter, but now has admitted that it secretly told the government that it was going to be a severely cold winter.
I know it’s just a misreading, but can you imagine if it were true? That would make them the most incompetent, deceptive, moronic, and criminally negligent organisation in the West.
Anyway, I’ll come back to reread this later when I’m more awake.
This may have been already said, but I think it’s possible that amongst all the warm winter predictions, they may have discovered that someone within the Met Office had sent a single warming about it being possible that the winter would be very cold. And now the Met Office is latching on to this single warming as some sort of proof that they knew it was going to be cold all along.
Ahh, now I understand. It’s the skeptics fault (again). I don’t know how I could have missed it. . . .
In my own defense, I made the apparently mistaken assumption that the Met Office was more mature than the average 15 year old girl who retreats pouting to her room when her school-mates are mean to her.
Here, I thought they owned a pair or two of “big boy pants” over there, which their budget would certainly lead one to believe.
My bad. I’ll try to do better next time.
Snowgate
This is not the first time the Met Office have been caught being “economical with the truth”! In Scotland we had people caught on the main Edinburgh – Glasgow motorway for days and afterwards the Met Office and BBC WRONGLY claimed they forecast it.
They did not! I know because I checked the forecast at 3pm and saw that the weather the next day was predicted to be “FOG”, so I removed the covers from my roof to get on with some work. I must admit I was pretty miffed with their total abysmal failure to forecast that snow!
But then the next day the BBC (Met Office friends and same global warmists ilk) kept reporting the party line that the Met Office had forecast the weather at 8pm the previous night. 8pm – that is the time their rain radar will have shown a big white line of snow and Met Stations in the North would have been reporting that white stuff. THAT WAS NOT A FORECAST BUT A HINDCAST
SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE SNOWGATE
…………………………….Met Office…………………………….
(you’ll have to imagine the graphic as the snowgate gradually falls down like the old alien invaders gradually smothering the useless Met Backcasting corportation)
The Met Office with its biased computer model is bound to show a milder than average winter for every winter. It’s warning to the government must be a forecast plagiarised from Piers Corbyn.
It’s no wonder it’s embarrassing – climate models (HadGEM3) are part of the GloSea4 seasonal forecasting system. See http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/modelling-systems/unified-model/climate-models/explained – and follow the link to more GloSea4 information.